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With humor, bluster and brio, Perot plowed past coaches’ and educators’ opposition to push schools into the knowledge economy.

Three years after he pushed the Texas Legislature to pass a sweeping school overhaul -- perhaps best known for its no-pass, no-play requirement for football players -- Ross Perot in 1987 received an honorary doctorate in educational leadership at North Texas State University in Denton. Perot, 89, died Tuesday.

White ended up getting from Perot much, much more — a top-to-bottom plan for overhauling Texas public schools.

Perot, then a Republican, served as head of a commission on schools named by White after the 1983 Legislature deadlocked on an education funding bill. White, a new Democratic governor, had hoped for such legislation so he could make good on a teacher pay bump he promised in the previous year’s election.

“Mark White thought he’d just get a teacher pay raise, but Ross turned it into reforming public schools,” lobbyist Rusty Kelley, one of several Austin insiders whom Perot hired to push through the sweeping overhaul, recalled Tuesday. “It was quite the initiative.”

According to former Texas Federation Teachers president John Cole, many Texans mostly remember the Perot-inspired House Bill 72, which passed in spring 1984, for its no-pass, no-play requirement.

Thereafter, students had to have passing grades to play sports such as football or to participate in other extracurricular activities.

"Of all the things that were in there, that no-pass, no-play was perhaps least consequential of all," recounted Cole, whose union was one of the few educator groups to endorse Perot's package. "Still, it generated a huge amount of controversy — second only to the test teachers had to pass to keep their teaching certificates."

Ross Perot, shown testifying before the House Public Education Committee in Austin in 2005, is credited with helping to reboot Texas public schools for a knowledge-based economy.(Harry Cabluck / File/AP)

Raising the sales tax and “sin taxes,” the bill provided a 40% raise for teachers, “plus the opportunity to get more through a career ladder,” he said.

Former Sen. Kent Caperton was a Bryan Democrat credited with helping then-Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby rescue the bill, after a House committee gutted it. Now an Austin lawyer, Caperton said Perot’s prodigious energy and determination miraculously steered the bill past opposition and into law.

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“He was truly as tireless an advocate as I’ve ever seen,” he said. “He never ever gave up.”

Over time, some of the Perot overhaul vanished — such as having the governor appoint the 15 members of the State Board of Education. Several years later, they reverted back to being elective positions.

Perot viewed board members who had to get elected as “inherently incapable of rational, objective decisions,” Caperton recalled.

“He was inclined to overstate things and simplify them — but that was part of his genius,” he said.

Ross Perot will rightfully be remembered for many things: business genius, philanthropic giant, American patriot, presidential candidate. In Texas, we must never forget the lasting public education reforms he spearheaded for our state in the 1980s. RIP. #txlege

“Somebody said, ‘Well, that would be very unusual.’ And he said, ‘Well, so is a one-legged tap dancer. But it happened!’’ she recalled. “He just kept everybody laughing.”

Union leader Cole said he was “privileged” to meet and work with Perot, who he said had a vision on how to retool Texas’ future workforce. In the mid-1980s, some Texas school districts were so underfunded, their high schools offered four years of basic arithmetic — and no algebra or geometry, Cole said.

Perot grasped “that an education designed to prepare students to work as ranch hands and roughnecks wasn’t going to be adequate in a world increasingly dependent on knowledge,” he said.

Robert T. Garrett, Austin Bureau Chief. Bob has covered state government and politics for The Dallas Morning News since 2002.
Earlier, he was a statehouse reporter for three newspapers, including the Dallas Times Herald. A fifth-generation Texan, Bob earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. He covers Gov. Greg Abbott, the state budget, school textbooks and child welfare.